Wednesday, March 04, 2009

I Bless the Rains Down in Africa ...

My StatCounter has a neat feature, in which IP addresses are put on a map I can access. The locations are not precise enough to go and find somebody's house -- my server shows up as several miles away from where I live -- but usually you can get that close.

Except that people who know how to rascal such things can apparently show a server where none exists. Every so often, I get a hit from a spot in the Atlantic Ocean smack on the Equator, a few hundred kilometers west of Gabon and south of Ghana.

There is, far as I can tell, nothing there but water.

There are a couple of tiny islands closer to Gabon, farther east -- Sao Tome and Principe, and south and west of them, a tinier spot, Annobon, but nothing relatively close to where the push-pin is.

So, either somebody is pulling my leg, or their server is way far away from the nearest possible land mass ...

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is that at the 0,0 point(zero latitude, zero longitude)? If so, it's an interesting place to choose for a server ... and creates a story idea or two.

J.D. Ray said...

Have you ever watched Lost? Kinda makes you wonder, huh...?

:D

Steve Perry said...

Doesn't look like where latitude and longitude start at zero.

Glider said...

Mayhaps it is on a big ship in the middle of the ocean. Liners do have the capacity to hold a server and make satellite internet connecions. Just a wild thought.

Mike G. said...

It is 0/0

Here's what I got putting "0N 0W" in google maps and zooming out:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=0N+0W&sll=40.768702,-73.944065&sspn=0.104916,0.154495&g=NY+10044&ie=UTF8&ll=-4.390229,8.261719&spn=34.815664,39.550781&z=5&iwloc=addr

Rory said...

IP may not be your physical location. One of my friends in Gresham shows an IP in the Bronx. My home IP sometimes shows Philadelphia. The servers I have used in the middle east have all shown IP addresses either in the US or Germany. One of them only 80 miles from my home.

Steve Perry said...

Hmm. I sit corrected. I was eyeballing it.

System glitch of some kind, maybe?

Mike G. said...

My guess is that the answer is simpler than that - when the IP address has no location data associated with it, 0/0 sounds like a reasonable default.

Tiel Aisha Ansari said...

It's the server aboard the dreadnought.

Bobbe Edmonds said...

Aquaman reads your blog.

Which, as far as superheros go, is absolutely nothing to brag about.

Brad said...

It is quite possible it is me, while I'm in Angola. I know the system there is prehistoric at best, and I've had my computer being listed as anywhere from Ghana to Portugal, depending on the day of the week.

Steve Perry said...

Brad --

Usually I see the push-pin in Angola when you are over there. Could be, though.

Brad said...

Is there a pattern to the time? I'm usually there every other month for 2 weeks. Except, I won't be going until May this time.

So if it shows up between now and the 1st of May, it ain't me.

Dave Chesser said...

Could be a US Navy ship.